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When I visit the duplicate URLs, for example http://www.ebids.com.pk/store/fashion-point/?category_name=spare-parts-accessories&parent_id=3708&page=store_about, I don't get redirected - the URL stays the same.

It looks like these are different tabs within the section of the seller Fashion Point - and both the title tag and content looks the same for all of them. For the URLs that are top-level tabs, like &page=store_about, or &page=company_policies, etc, I would do 2 things:

1. Update the title tag to say something like "About Fashion Point" or "Fashion Point's Company Policies." This will take care of a duplicate title tag problem.

2. Encourage, the people behind the Fashion Point account, (and probably all accounts), to fill out all of the tabs, so there's actual About, Company Policy, etc. content there - then the content will actually be different, so you won't get duplicate content problems. It might be a good idea to require that those sections are filled out before making the storefront public for a user, that way potential buyers will have more information about who they're buying from, and and the empty sections won't cause duplicate content problems.

Your'e right, ideally these URLs would not exist until needed. The problem I have is that our search is set up so it doesn't require an HTTP Post to the server - it works by manipulating the URL, so if someone searches for Service 5 at Location 1, the URL /location-1/service-5 has to present them with something - we're using a search form, but a signup form would work well too, and I think there is some limited use to the user to say "no, we don't have anything here."

I guess I could rebuild the page somewhat to make the "There are no results for Service 5 at Location 1" message bigger - it could even be in the Title / H1, then show my re-search or signup form - that would get rid of duplicate title tag problems, but my content would still essentially be the same - a form - so I'd have duplicate content problems.

Noindex would be a good idea, and easy to do. Do you know how easy it is to un-noindex later? As in, if I remove the noindex meta tag or header, how long will it take search engines to pick up on the change?

These URLs are in my sitemap too, and I should try to get rid of them there, but checking if there are search results in each location when building the sitemap is going to kill the webserver

I'm a bit surprised that the override in the metabox isn't being respected 100%, but I haven't played with the manual overrides much. Are you using a full-page caching plugin, like WP Super-Cache? If so you might have to clear the cache's contents to see the changes.

I think the problem should go away because you edited the Titles & Meta settings, but you can check right away. Do you know how to read HTML, at least sort of? Look at the page's source, (in Chrome: View > Developer > View Source), and look to see what's between the <title>and</title> tags - they will be fairly near the top, (you can Ctrl+F in View Source to find them). That's the title tag that we're trying to change, so if "| Parker Staffing Services" is gone, Moz, (and maybe Google), will be happy, then it's just a case of waiting for Moz & Google to re-crawl your site to see the changes.

If that doesn't work, and you don't want to set the site name to something shorter, there's a way to do it with PHP. I believe Yoast SEO passes the title tag through a WordPress filter before outputting it to the page. You can hook on to that filter and replace "| Parker Staffing Services" with an empty string. This is a bit overkill, though - you should be able to solve the problem in the admin interface.

I think you have a few options:

In the Titles & Metas section Yoast uses a sort of templating system. So if you go to the Post Types tab and remove %%sep%% and %%sitename%% from the Title Template under the "Posts" heading, (probably the first one), you'll be removing the "| Parker Staffing Services" from all of your Posts. You can do the same for Pages, Media, and any Custom Post Types you have installed on that tab.

The other tabs are similar. Taxonomies is just a scary word for Categories, Tags, and things that behave like categories & tags, and has nothing to do with stuffed animals like it looks like. If you go that tab you'll see a lot of the Title Templates end in %%sep%% %%sitename%% so you can remove those as well, if you want. That'll take the "| Parker Staffing Services" off of the Tag & Category archive pages, (pages like example.com/category/new-staff). The Archives tab works the same way. If you're worried about messing things up, a quick hack is to take a screenshot before changing anything, or do a database backup.

You can also override these templates on a per-post/page/CPT basis using Yoast SEO metabox, (that's what WP calls the boxes in the admin), on the Edit Post/Page/CPT screen in the admin. The Yoast SEO metabox is usually right below the box you write your actual content in, but it may be forced down depending on what plugins you have installed. If you don't see it at all click the "Screen Options" tab in the top right of the screen, it'll slide down and show you a bunch of checkboxes, where you should be able to make the Yoast SEO metabox visible. In the Yoast SEO metabox, click the title in the Snippet Preview, and the snippet editor will magically appear, letting you edit the title tag & meta description for that page only.

Hopefully that helps.

We have search on our site, using the URL, so we might have: example.com/location-1/service-1, or example.com/location-2/service-2. Since we're a directory we want these pages to rank.

Sometimes, there are no search results for a particular location/service combo, and when that happens we show an advanced search form that lets the user choose another location, or expand the search area, or otherwise help themselves. However, that search form still appears at the URL example.com/location/service - so there are several location/service combos on our website that show that particular form, leading to duplicate content issues.

We may have search results to display on these pages in the future, so we want to keep them around, and would like Google to look at them and even index them if that happens, so what's the best option here? Should we rel="canonical" the page to the example.com/search (where the search form usually resides)? Should we serve the search form page with an HTTP 404 header? Something else?

I look forward to the discussion.

I'm fairly new, so take this with a grain of salt but:

1. I expect the PA might improve over time, although I can't be sure. Also remember that Moz doesn't update in realtime, so even if Google figures out what's going on and gives you credit, it might take a week or two to show up in Moz.

2. (I'm more confident on this answer) It'll take time. Nothing in SEO is instant, in my experience. Also, if the huge publication picked it up & linked to you, you'll probably get a bunch of other copy-cat links.

I don't believe Google will make a selection for each option in a drop-down, even if they're able to see it. The traditional wisdom is to also provide ways to click to each location - so, somewhere there should be a link to each state, then you can have URLs like /bands/arizona and show the bands in Arizona.

I also have a search-based interface, and I do OK, but our short-term plans include a way to click through to each location without submitting a search form - it should help Google find our content.

What do you mean by "Without Pre-Rendering"?

Google says they can now index some Javascript content. I believe they're using actual browsers, or something very similar, to index web pages. Depending on how true this is, there's a chance they'll index anything you have hidden away in Javascript.

You can use the "Fetch as Google" tool in Webmaster Tools to see what the Googlebot sees. I just ran a test on my site and it does render Javascript. On my site some page elements appear in a different place with Javascript disabled, and in Google's render of the page they appear in the Javascript-enabled location. If you have actual content in the Javascript I don't know what Google will do with it, but they can at least see the result of your Javascript.

There's a business I work with as a web dev that has 2 nearly identical sites - one for their E-commerce business and the other for their local business. I haven't done a full SEO analysis on the sites, but I can tell you it's not working out well SEO-wise - they're pretty buried, and I would bet quite a bit it's because of duplicate content.

If the two restaurants are truly different, each should have its own website, with its own content, on its own domain. If the only difference is the street address then there should be 1 website with a "locations" page showing how to get to each location. If they're a bit different but share a name, I would build single website, but have a page, or couple of pages about each location, (so, I would have location-specific info in a folder, eg. restaurant.com/location2/the-chef). Does that make sense?

Thanks for the insight - it does make sense to go with /location-name/service-name because people might want to look at all services in a location, but all locations for a service doesn't make much sense, (unless someone's scraping my site, and I don't want to make life easy for those people!).

Things like /within-50-miles will be canonicalized to the base location as you suggest. You're right that there isn't much difference between that and simply /service-a/location-a

I want everything to be bookmarkable, so keyword search will be either a parameter or another path, (like /keyword-{urlencoded keyword content} ), and I may or may not canonicalize that to just the location/service combo, or simply noindex it, or leave it as-is and see what happens. The /location-a/ part of the URL can accept a lot of formats, and some, like GPS coordinates, will have to be noindexed to avoid duplicate content, (I guess I could rel=canonical them to the closest town or something, I can save that as an experiment for later).

Thanks again for the insight. It makes sense to me.

Hi Moz-Mind,

We've got a bunch of duplicate content issues in our directory of trucking-related businesses, caused by search terms that can appear in any order, (classic mistake). We're taking advantage of this our work on URLs to try to improve our URL structure, and I'm not sure which way I want to go.

These are the options we're considering. What does the Moz-mind think of each of them?

• example.com/location-name/service-name
• example.com/service-name/location-name
• example.com/service-name-near-location-name

For the moment location-name would be a city & state abbreviation, like atlanta-ga, (unless it's better to use something else).

Since these are search URLs, it's also possible to add a distance restriction, and a keyword, to the search criteria. How do you suggest adding the distance restriction?

• example.com/service-name/location-name/50-miles
• example.com/service-name/within-50-miles/location-name
• example.com/service-name-within-50-miles-of-location-name

And the keyword?

• example.com/service-name/location-name/keyword
• example.com/service-name/location-name/keyword/{actual-keyword}
• example.com/service-name-near-location-name/keyword

Something else?

I was leaning toward example.com/service-name/location-name/within-50-miles, but I thought of the /service-name-near-location-name/ and /service-name/within-50-miles-of/location-name options today and really like how they make sense both to computers and to people, not unlike example.com/GA/atlanta/service-name/50

I'm looking forward to hearing what the community thinks. There must be an established best practice for directories, but if it's kind of ugly I'd like to find an even better way, if possible.

Thanks,

John

Unless there's a reason to take the 301s down, don't.

If you don't want to have to wade through them all when you're editing your .htaccess file you could monitor your server logs which should show all requests & responses your server receives & sends. When no requests for a URL, (and therefor no 301 responses happen), come in for some long period of time, (a month? 6 months? a year?), then you may be able to safely remove the 301 directive from your .htacess, (or wherever you configure your 301s).

Most of the data about the keyword + "near me" keywords came from GA - or its integration with the Webmaster Tools. This means I've got data about what the keywords are, where, and how many times, we've been in the SERPs, the # of clicks, & the click-through rate. Of course, the CTR is not super useful for comparison with other keywords if they're not at the same position in the search results.

Is the idea of running a small PPC campaign to see how well the "near me" version of a keyword converts vs. the non-"near me" version? That seems like a good idea, (I'm fairly new at doing any active SEO or Keyword Research). Once I've got that info I should be able to see if it's worth devoting resources to tracking "near me" - heck, I could even add a few geographic areas as well, so I would see how "tire repair near me" compares to "tire repair" compares to "tire repair nyc."

Thanks for the insight.

We're a directory of industry-specific services, so a lot of people find their way to our site by searching something like "tire repair near me." For every keyword we rank for, ("tire repair"), we also rank for the "near me" version, ("tire repair near me").

I'm looking for opinions on if is worth spending ~50% of the keywords included in my plan to track these "near me" keywords, or if we would be better off tracking some of the most important "near me" keywords, and some of those same base keywords on a local basis for major population centres, (for example "tire repair nyc").

What does the forum think?

Thanks for the link to the correlation article. I've seen the same effect - we have a competitor that seems to be beating everyone in the industry at SEO, but with half the domain authority of some other competitors - but he has a lot of +1s.

I'll take a look at how much action there is on G+ in our industry. We're having decent success on Facebook, and I think that's the main activity hub, but the followed links & some activity of G+ may well be worth any time spent on Google Plus.

We still don't know if any of this is changing, though, beyond your, (correct, I believe), observation that Google Plus is being detangled from the rest of Google's products.

I've noticed that Google Plus seems to have a larger influence on ranking than other social networks, especially for one of our competitors. We haven't started using Google Plus, and I'm wondering if, from an SEO standpoint, it's worth putting energy into after last month's changes.

TL;DR: After last month's changes, is Google Plus still an important ranking signal?